This week I read a blog on excuses that testers must stop giving. The first excuse they said that testers give was that they only have read-only permissions, and can only look at the logs. Testers tend to blame why they can’t figure something out because they don’t have access to it, only the developers do. The second excuse they give is that they “don’t deploy a build, some other team does it for us”. The author, Mahesh C., basically was saying that testers need to learn how to do this type of stuff on their own. If a tester can’t deploy a build because they don’t know how, and all of the developers are busy, the the solution is to learn how. Testers can learn a lot form something as simple as creating a new build of the product, and seeing why and how it failed for themselves. The third excuse that blog talked about was that testers say that they don’t debug an issue, they only log it. However, the author is arguing the point that many of the times the logs will say it all. A log can pinpoint the exact problem, and that’s exactly where a developer would also go to look. The fourth excuse is when they say “I don’t know why it happened. Developer resolved it and I simply verified it”. Mahesh said that as a tester it is your responsibility to ask the developer what he/she did to fix the issue. It is not good being in a black box and being oblivious to how things work. Finally, the fifth excuse that Mahesh talked about in the blog is that “I didn’t get the opportunity to work on anything else except for manual testing”. He basically went on to say that testers need to find the time to do everything and work on time management. Overall, I thought this was an okay blog. However, was a bit aggressive, and I felt like it was saying that ALL testers say these things. The author kind of made testers seem lazy and like they didn’t care which I don’t find to be true at all. He did apologize at the end for being “harsh” but that doesn’t make up for the fact that he was making harsh assumptions throughout the whole thing.
From the blog CS@Worcester – Alex's Comp Sci Blog by alexsblog13 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.